Culture coach: The week’s essential arts stories
Every week I'll round up the biggest arts stories from around the web, recommend a long read and look ahead at what's coming upEach Thursday, I am going to round up the main arts stories of the week. Here's the first instalment.• It was Turner prize ...
BBC and Arts Council launch joint digital Space for culture
Partnership set to offer hundreds of hours of new and archived arts programming online, on mobile and on digital TVJohn Peel's record collection, the first film by Ridley Scott and all 37 of Shakespeare's plays – each in a different language – are ...
TV highlights 01/05/2012
Meet The Romans With Mary Beard | The Hunt For Bin Laden | Ancient X Files | The South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2012 | Mad Men | Later Live – With Jools HollandMeet The Romans With Mary Beard9pm, BBC2The Cambridge classicist explores life in th...
The Rolling Stones: Fifty Years by Christopher Sandford
The Rolling Stones' merchandise, rather than their music, has ensured their survivalPopular culture gobbles up its favourites and almost immediately spits them out, so how come the Rolling Stones – who until very recently still creakily cavorted thro...
Critical eye: book reviews roundup
The Sex Myth by Brooke Magnanti, The Good Father by Noah Hawley and How Soon Is Now? by Richard King"I can't remember a more incoherent, confusing and downright bonkers book than this peculiar tome by Brooke Magnanti, the real-life research scientist b...
The Ex Factor
He's been the linchpin of top-rating TV for a decade, but we still know little about Cowell the man. This book doesn't help much"Rosebud," croaks Charles Foster Kane with his dying breath, the mysterious utterance symbolic of what drives Orson Welles's...
On her majesty’s silver service: expats dust off tuxedos for BritWeek in LA
Britons famous, once famous and perhaps to be famous again are beating the drum for the UK in Hollywood this weekFor once, there was no shame in being on the B-list: they came from all corners of Hollywood – peaks of fame, foothills of recognition an...
When tigers roamed Holmfirth
One of them, anyway. And it was as recently as the 1940s. Now the story of Fenella the Pennine Tigress is about to roar into songYorkshire villages are the guardians of some extraordinary stories, ranging from the pygmy tribe which lived at Brandisburt...
Taylor Swift in talks for Joni Mitchell biopic
Singer reportedly 'circling the role' of Mitchell in a film adaptation of Sheila Weller's book Girls Like UsTaylor Swift may soon be cast as Joni Mitchell in a big-screen biopic. The 22-year-old country singer is reportedly "circling the role" of Mitch...
Vilde Frang – from prodigy to virtuoso
Frang, a Norwegian who performed with Mariss Jansons when she was just 13, is looking forward to performing in London and rescuing some of the violin repertory from 'student classes and old ladies'As the pianist and writer about music Charles Rosen pu...
A History of Singing by John Potter and Neil Sorrell – review
On song – from lullabies to operaSinging is a human capacity that seems absolutely natural and even constitutive of our humanity. Nothing could be more affectingly human than the imagined scene of a mother or father singing a child to sleep, or a chi...
Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls find literary fame
Novelist who made the Costa award shortlist brings the 'fiendish northern sweets' into her plotAfter yesterday's news in the Guardian Northerner of the Bowes museum inspiring Booker prizewinner Peter Carey, here is a similar literary accolade for Wigan...
